Friday, January 16, 2004
Home again.
I honestly can't say the trip did me much good. It was nice to be warm for a few days, but I think that's about the extent of it.
We got into Jacksonville about 3 a.m. Monday morning.
I've never been very good at travelogues, so I'm not going to make much of an effort at one here. It was very strange being back in Jacksonville after almost three decades. I visited all of the places I lived as a child there. To my amazement, they were all still standing and pretty much unchanged. I stood outside my old elementary school (Brookview Elementary) and watched the kids getting out for the day. Sadly, much of Jacksonville has changed. It has the same mass-produced, pre-fab, cookie-cutter feel as most other places these days. Consumeria. Starbucks. Blockbuster. Pizza Hut. Wal-Mart. Home Depot. Ad nauseum. We found a nice diner (Third Street Diner) run by two Greek brothers that didn't feel at all pre-fab, and a decent Thai restaurant (Thai Garden).
The best part about Jacksonville Beach was collecting fossils at low tide. There's a late Tertiary or Quarternary deposit somewhere just offshore (perhaps the Pliocene-aged Cypresshead Formation) that gives up bits and pieces of the vanished megafauna to those who know what they're looking for. Spooky and I walked miles and miles, picking up shells and taunting seagulls, dodging stranded jellyfish and finding fossils. We collected three species of starfish and a mermaid's purse. As for the fossils, I found a couple of beautiful molars from extinct horse species (?Equus sp.), a sizable chunk of either mastodon (?Mammut) or gomphothere tooth, a couple of pieces of mammoth tooth (Mammuthus ?columbi), a manatee rib, two incomplete whale inner ear bones (Mysticeti incertae sedis), a nice alligator vertebra, shark teeth (Odontaspis cuspidata, Hemipristis serra, and Negaprion brevirostris), an eagle ray tooth (Myliobatidae), a ?dolphin tooth, an assortment of bony fish, tortoise, and turtle bones, large chunks of indeterminate mammal bone (mostly elephant and whale, I suspect), and a few other odds and ends. The mammoth and mastodon bits were the real prizes, though.
There was a gorgeous moonrise Monday night, and a spectacular sunrise on Tuesday morning. I marveled at the diversity of birdlife and thought of Poppy. We found two dead pelicans, both of them young, and Spooky took many photographs of them both.
We left Jacksonville on Wednesday afternoon and drove south to Saint Augustine. As the day ended, we visited the Castillo de San Marcos, the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, and had dinner at a Mexican place on Avenida Menendez. After dark, we crossed the Bridge of Lions and drove out to the Lighthouse, marveling at the beam sweeping across the starry sky. Spooky had never been to Florida before, and I think the subtropical botanics and warm January temperatures were freaking her out just a little.
On Thursday morning, we drove down to Marineland, because I was craving an oceanarium, only to find that, this time of year, it's only open Friday-Monday. So, we drove on, almost as far as Daytona, then circled back to Saint Augustine. We had lunch at The Pizza Garden on the corner of Hypolita and St. George, mushroom and meatball. It was definitely the best pizza I've had south of New York City. Afterwards, we wandered down to the Lightner Museum, growing increasingly annoyed with the tourists (I'm never a tourist, merely a visitor) and the damned sight-seeing trolleys. About 3:30, we headed home and got back into Atlanta about 9:30 p.m.
So there you go. In a nutshell, there's the trip. And now I'm back here, and wishing it had done me more good.
But my head is full of frustration and anger that the sea air could not dispell. Publishers who won't promote my books, sloppy, idiotic reviewers, deadlines, and so on. All the crap that make's writing for a living the unending, glass-chewing joy that it is. Now I have to go deal with some of that dren. It piles up, and might smother me soon.
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